


Small Boat

by lemonsharks



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: F/F, Fluff without Plot, Kissing, Missing Scene, What the kirkwall nerds get up to when Hawke is out with someone else
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-05
Updated: 2016-06-05
Packaged: 2018-07-12 11:47:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7101964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonsharks/pseuds/lemonsharks
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isabela, as usual, jumps in head first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Boat

Kirkwall’s gone quiet with Hawke and Varric, Fenris and Bethany holed up in the Vimmarks. Three weeks have passed, and not a word from any of them. Merrill would be worried, if she didn’t know exactly how far a creaking aravel and grumpy team of halla couldn’t travel in the same time--walking’s faster. Not by much. 

She spends her mornings in the Alienage, telling stories to the children too little or too ill to be sent to work. Dalish tales, full of folk bigger than anyone left today. In the afternoons she catches a handful of the little ones acting out the story of Fen’Harel stealing fire from Sylaise, only to lose track of it in the forest and set it loose upon the world. A girl, Benna, takes the part of the Dread Wolf, and she cackles with a lovely, overwrought kind of menace. 

Isabela drags her out in the evenings. She’s bought a dinghy and painted the side with the words, _Small Boat_ , tucked it into a hidden little cove along the coast. It helps with the smuggling--gets her out of Aveline’s reach and back onto the water. She’s exposed when she meets with her more skittish contacts, and it does her credit that only a handful have tried to cheat or kill her yet. 

Tonight it’s different--she hands Merrill an oar and shoves off, out into the breakers, and something changes in the set of her shoulders. A relaxing, an exhaled breath. Merrill wishes she could lean forward, that she had the courage to touch her soft cheek with her fingertips, but she rows instead. Out onto the glass-calm sea with both moons out and full and the sky almost as bright as day. 

“It’s perfect out here, isn’t it?” Isabela asks, locking her oar into place and leaning forward. She’s very near. “All this night, all this ocean.”

“A bit big for my taste,” Merrill quips, and Isabela laughs. 

“I don’t share this with many people.”

“Not even Hawke?” 

“Especially not Hawke. She wouldn’t understand it.“

“And I do?”

“You understand a world bigger than the one we live in, Kitten.”

Merrill goes quiet for a time. Water laps softly against the sides of the boat, and Isabela sits with her elbows on her knees and her eyes watching some place between Merrill’s shoulder and the city lights in the distance. 

She’s smiling, a smaller, quieter smile than Merrill has ever seen on her. No smirk or scowl, no sharpness to it, and Merrill feels her own lips pulling back to mirror the expression. 

The boat rocks when Isabela stand-crouches and moves toward her. She kneels before Merrill’s seat, and says, “I don’t normally do things like this. I normally jump in head first.”

“I like that about you,” Merrill says. “I think it’s bra--”

Isabela normally jumps in head first, and her lips meet Merrill’s like a striking snake. Breath leaves her lungs through her nose, and she kisses back with a fierceness she did not realize she had in her. The sea has made _her_ brave, has given her the strength to part her lips and lean forward, to move one of Isabela’s hands from the side of the boat into her hair. 

She’s had no one so close in the last five years. No one since Mahariel, who she would have married if he’d ever plucked up the courage to _ask_. It seems all her free hours end in Isabela’s company, and all the little touches, carefully ended before they go on too long, make _sense_ now. 

They part too soon, and Merrill laughs a little. “I wonder if I ever knew how to breathe.”

“You’ll remember soon enough. Andraste’s arse, I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

Merrill laughs. She doesn’t have the mind for anything else. 

Then she leans in and kisses Isabela for herself. 


End file.
